Subjects covered...

Friday, 3 April 2015

Excel VBA - industrialisation...Part Nine "Enumerating DDE Servers"

A DDE Server is an old technology that is still used by a number of vendors to push real time data into Excel. It has mainly been replaced by RTD but is still in use by many firms for internal applications and for some legacy applications. In some quite particular use cases DDE outperforms RTD and so it will remain in use for some time yet.

The requirement for Excel Industrialisation is to provide an operating paradigm such that a portfolio of Excel spreadsheets can be supported and managed using code rather than people. Over the course of this series we'll build up to show a complete proof-of-concept, although production ready code will not be shipped.

This post covers the case of enumerating all of the DDE servers that are included with an Excel Workbook.

As with all of the code published in this series, this is not production standard, it's proof-of-concept to illustrate what can be done and what has been done with other firms. So there is no error handling and other features that are needed to make the user experience robust and a real value-add are missing.